Universities face survey warning

From WikiLeaks

Tougher guidelines are to be issued to warn universities against manipulating the results of a league table of student satisfaction.

The Higher Education Funding Council says it will issue the guidelines for the next National Student Survey.

This week lecturers at Kingston University were revealed to have told students only to put positive comments in this official national survey.

Scouting for Girls were hired as an incentive for students to fill survey

The Cambridge students' union now says it doubts the survey's credibility.

The guidelines are expected to warn universities that they must not try to influence how students complete this annual survey.

Employment threat

It follows this week's evidence from an audio recording that students at Kingston University had been told by lecturers to falsify their responses to improve the university's ranking.

Universities Secretary John Denham condemned survey cheats

Students were told that a poor rating would devalue their degree and "nobody is going to want to employ you".

The Universities Secretary John Denham told the House of Commons that he "utterly condemned" this attempt to distort the survey.

But hundreds of e-mails sent to the BBC News website have challenged the claim that this was an isolated incident - with students claiming that many universities are trying to manipulate the survey.

These include repeated claims that students have been told that a low ranking in the survey will damage the value of their degrees - using what one student described as "scare tactics".

There are also claims that universities are seeing the survey in terms of public image, rather than public value.

Academics contacting the website have highlighted how some universities advertise their "triumph" when they have a high rating in the survey - using the result to recruit new students.

Reputation management

Among the information sent by readers have been copies of internal e-mails between senior staff at Anglia Ruskin University.

The student survey faces tighter scrutiny next year

An e-mail describes the survey as being used by universities for "reputation management".

"Other HEIs (higher education institutions) are taking this survey very seriously as part of their reputation management, since the results are now featuring in league tables as the proxy for teaching quality," said an e-mail sent in January 2008.

The e-mail says that students should be aware that the survey results are "increasingly seen as a key component of a university's external reputation and that reputation will be attached to the qualification with which they leave us".

It also suggested that lecturers could end lectures early so that students could be "directed to nearby computer terminals to complete the survey".

The university accepts the authenticity of the e-mail, but says that the e-mail also includes the observation: "It is important that we do not attempt to influence students unduly and our key objective is to maximise the response rate."

Pop band offer

The importance of the survey to universities is also reflected by the efforts to ensure that as many students as possible complete the feedback.

At the University of Surrey, university funds are being used to hire a pop group, Scouting for Girls, as an incentive for students to complete the satisfaction survey.

Students were told by their student union that: "If 80% of you final year students fill out the National Student Survey, the University will give the Students' Union the money to put on this fantastic band."

A university spokesman said this was about improving the numbers completing the survey - and that there was no influence over what students said about their university.

But there have been wider questions about whether this survey can produce an objective picture of student experiences.

The University of Cambridge's student union says the survey's credibility is in doubt - as it appears to be influenced by the demands of external PR rather than being an objective assessment.

"There are serious questions raised about this. The argument is that these are isolated cases - but people are seeing it as a PR exercise," says Peter Coulthard of the Cambridge University Students' Union.

But the Higher Education Funding Council, which runs the survey, has said there is no evidence of widespread problems that could invalidate the results.

A spokesman says that students are intelligent enough to make up their own minds and that what they say in the survey is confidential.